According to the Register, the Copyright Office must evolve from a small department of public record to a digitally savvy administrator of
intellectual property rights, remedies, and commercial information, which requires the office to evaluate the needs of the national copyright system objectively and transparently. As described in this report, we agree that the Copyright Office has technical and organizational challenges that hinder its ability to meet its statutory and business needs. We further acknowledged that the office has begun to address these needs in its technical upgrades research. However, making progress in addressing these limitations will require a strategic vision as well as effective planning, and our recommendations are aimed at assisting the office in these areas.
The Register further noted that we did not examine the legal relationship between the Copyright Office and the Library and that our
recommendations assume that the Copyright Office will continue to route its IT needs through Library processes and managers, similar to other Library units. She added that members of Congress have recently
questioned the current governance structure and that it would be prudent for the Library and the Copyright Office to solicit further congressional guidance before implementing GAO’s recommendations.
We acknowledge that concerns about the legal relationship between the Copyright Office and the Library have been raised in Congress. In our report we discuss the office’s legal responsibilities, including the
relationship between the office and the Library and the Copyright Office’s distinctive mission. Our review of the office’s IT environment was
undertaken in light of current law and the existing organizational structure. We recognize that future legislation may change the office’s
responsibilities in administering copyright law, which may in turn impact its future technology needs. Whether such changes to the law will alter the office’s placement in the Library is unknown at this time. Regardless of the Copyright Office’s organizational placement, it still needs to support and justify its request for $7 million for IT-related projects in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.
In addition, the Register stated that we primarily reviewed management issues and did not examine issues with the Library’s technical
infrastructure that, in her view, appear to be insufficient to support a 21st- century Copyright Office. While our report did highlight management challenges, we also noted several technical challenges impeding the office’s ability to carry out its work. Specifically, we noted challenges in the performance and usability of the office’s eCO system; concerns
regarding the implementation of security controls; and data integrity, availability, and retention issues. Moreover, our report on IT management Library-wide identified a number of issues, both management-related and technical, and made numerous recommendations aimed at addressing them.38 Given the current organizational structure, it is important that
both the Library and the Copyright Office take actions to address the challenges within their purview and collaborate in ways that best support their respective missions.
Finally, the Register stated that our recommendations would require the Copyright Office to absorb more of the burden of preparing investment proposals, cost-benefit analyses, and strategic IT planning, which have not been in the domain of the office. According to the Register, this would require the office to acquire additional IT specialists. However, preparing such planning documentation is required of all service units by Library policy for investments of this nature, and is consistent with best practices for selecting IT investments to pursue for funding. In addition, developing this preliminary planning documentation requires knowledge and
expertise of the office’s business processes and mission needs, but not necessarily technical expertise. Once the appropriate investments have been selected, this preliminary information can be used to develop business requirements, which in turn can be used by Copyright Office staff or external vendors with the appropriate expertise to identify technical solutions that will most effectively and efficiently support the Copyright Office’s mission.
We are sending copies of this report to the appropriate congressional committees, the Librarian of Congress, and other interested parties. In addition, the report is available at no charge on the GAO website at
If you or your staff have any questions about this report, please contact
me at (202) 512-6253 or
Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last page of this report. GAO staff who made key contributions to this report are listed in appendix III.
Joel C. Willemssen
The Senate Appropriations Committee report accompanying the fiscal year 2015 legislative branch appropriations bill (S. Rep. No. 113-196) required that we review the Copyright Office’s current information technology (IT) environment and its plans for modernizing that
infrastructure. Our specific objectives for this review were to (1) describe the legal, technical, and organizational aspects of the Copyright Office’s current IT environment and (2) describe and evaluate the Copyright Office’s plans for modernization.
To address our first objective, we reviewed the legal requirements for the Copyright Office found in the Copyright Act and the Administrative
Procedure Act,1 and related legal requirements for the Library of
Congress, as well as the Library’s IT management policies and procedures.2 We also reviewed documentation related to concerns
expressed by internal and external users of Copyright’s registration system, including public comments and transcripts of meetings with the public; testimony, hearing transcripts, and speeches by the Register of Copyrights; results from customer satisfaction surveys for the office’s systems; e-mails related to IT challenges sent by Copyright Office staff to the Associate Register for Registration Policy and Practice; and help desk tickets provided to both the Copyright Office help desk and the Library of Congress IT help desk. We reviewed feasibility studies and plans for migrating functionality from legacy systems to Copyright’s registration system. We also relied on the results of our recent review of the Library’s IT management.3
In addition, to test the integrity of the office’s deposit files, we selected a random probability sample of the deposit files stored in the Library of Congress’s storage servers. Specifically, we selected a simple random sample of 60 of the over 6 million deposit files that were stored from 2005
117 U.S.C. ch. 1-8 and 10-13 and 5 U.S.C. §§ 551-559.
22 U.S.C. ch. 5 and, e.g., Library of Congress Regulation (LCR) 210-1, Organization of the
Library of Congress; LCR 212-2, Functions and Organization of Information Technology Services, Office of the Librarian; LCR 215-1, Functions and Organization of the Copyright Office; LCR 1600, Information Resource Management Policy and Responsibilities; LCR 1620, Information Technology Security Policy of the Library of Congress; and LCR 1921,
Protection and Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information.
3GAO, Library of Congress: Strong Leadership Needed to Address Serious Information
to 2014.4 We met with staff in the Library’s Office of Information
Technology Services to confirm that the selected files existed in the expected locations. Finally, we interviewed Library of Congress officials, including the Library’s former acting Chief Information Officer (CIO) and head of the Library’s Information Technology Services division, and Copyright Office officials, including the Register of Copyrights, the Copyright CIO, and the heads of Copyright Office’s program areas. To describe and evaluate the office’s plans for modernization, we
reviewed best practices on IT investment management identified by GAO5
and Library policies and procedures. We also reviewed requirements for IT strategic planning found in related provisions of the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and guidance from the Office of Management and Budget.6 We
reviewed the Copyright Office’s IT-related funding requests in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, including the underlying cost estimates, and compared them against the IT investment management criteria. We also reviewed testimony, hearing transcripts, and speeches made by the Register about the office’s needs for technical upgrades. Finally, we interviewed Library of Congress officials, including the Library’s former acting CIO, the Register of Copyrights, and the Copyright Office’s CIO, to discuss the office’s efforts to plan for IT improvement initiatives.
We conducted this performance audit from June 2014 to March 2015 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain
4With this probability sample, each member of the study population had a nonzero
probability of being included, and that probability could be computed for any member. Because we followed a probability procedure based on random selections, our sample is only one of a large number of samples that we might have drawn. Since each sample could have provided different results, we express our confidence in the precision of our particular sample’s results as a 95 percent confidence interval. This is the interval that would contain the actual population value for 95 percent of the samples we could have drawn.
5GAO, Information Technology Investment Management: A Framework for Assessing and
Improving Process Maturity
640 U.S.C. §§ 11311-11313; OMB, Management of Federal Information Resources,
Circular No. A-130 (Washington, D.C.: Nov. 28, 2000) and Preparation, Submission and Execution of the Budget, Circular No. A-11 (Washington, D.C.: November 2014). Because the Library of Congress is a legislative branch agency, it is not subject to the Clinger- Cohen Act or OMB policies. However, these requirements and policies still reflect best practices that are useful to apply here.
sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.
Joel C. Willemssen, (202) 512-6253 or
In addition to the contact named above, individuals making contributions to this report included Nick Marinos, Lon Chin, and Chris Warweg (assistant directors), James Ashley, Chris Businsky, Sa’ar Dagani, Neil Doherty, Torrey Hardee, Thomas Johnson, Kaelin Kuhn, Lee McCracken, David Plocher, Meredith Raymond, Kate Sharkey, Andrew Stavisky, Tina Torabi, and Charles Youman.